Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a play demonstrating the movement of African Americans to freedom in 1910. The play is set in a boarding house which is a transitional place for newly freed African American to harbor while they adjust their newly-found freedom. The Images of travel and the use of the phrase "the road" interposes on the different transitions each character has during the play; the play examines how African Americans' search for their cultural identity, following the repression of slavery. For many this involved the physical migration from the South to the North in an attempt to find a new start: " In an effort to flee the discriminations they faced in the south and hoping to find financial success, many blacks migrated to Pittsburgh in the 1910's searching for a new life and their own identity..."

( Mathers 13).

Joe Turner's Come and Gone symbolize how African Americans...